University of Chicago, Department of Psychology, 5848 South University Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2012 Nov;141(4):635-41. doi: 10.1037/a0027248. Epub 2012 Feb 13.
Are numerals estranged from a sense of the actual quantities they represent? We demonstrate that, irrespective of numerical size or distance, direct comparison of the relative quantities represented by symbolic and nonsymbolic formats leads to performance markedly worse than when comparing 2 nonsymbolic quantities (Experiment 1). Experiment 2 shows that this effect cannot be attributed to differences in perceptual processing streams. Experiment 3 shows that there is no additional cost of mixing 2 formats that are both symbolic; that is, the decrement in mixing formats is specific to mixing symbolic and nonsymbolic representations. In sum, we show that accessing a sense of how much a numerical symbol actually represents is a surprisingly difficult and nontrivial process. Our data are consistent with the view that numerical symbols operate primarily as an associative system in which relations between symbols come to overshadow those between symbols and their quantity referents.
数字是否与它们所代表的实际数量脱节？我们证明，无论数字的大小或距离如何，直接比较符号和非符号格式所表示的相对数量会导致表现明显差于比较两个非符号数量（实验 1）。实验 2 表明，这种效果不能归因于不同的感知处理流之间的差异。实验 3 表明，混合两种符号格式不会产生额外的成本；也就是说，混合格式的减少是特定于混合符号和非符号表示的。总之，我们表明，获取一个数字符号实际上代表多少的感觉是一个非常困难和复杂的过程。我们的数据与以下观点一致，即数字符号主要作为一个联想系统运作，其中符号之间的关系开始超过符号与其数量指称之间的关系。
